Still Life

The centerpiece of my childhood kitchen table was a bowl of wax fruit. The centerpieces of most of my childhood friends’ kitchen tables were bowls of wax fruit. In a few cases, these bowls of fruit were brought back from a family member’s trip to Mexico, and were made of onyx or paper-maché or, very occasionally, blown glass, but the consistent theme here was that it was fruit and that it was artificial. I especially liked the grapes, which were not wax, but rather, rubbery spheres that made little exhaling sounds when squeezed, and then popped back into shape. The other decorative items that graced most of the homes I visited during my suburban childhood were Venetian glass sculptures of clowns. I retain a retro fondness for wax fruit, but even in an era when I admired shag carpeting and walls of mirrored tiles streaked with gold veining, I thought the Murano glass clowns were hideous. I was a tasteless but discriminating little boy.
I don’t know whether the ubiquitous presence of bowls of wax fruit is a phenomenon particular to the late 50’s, but I do know that representations of bowls of fruit has a long and varied history. Here’s what I found out about the subject from my in-depth and extensive research on the subject (which means I went to wikipedia):
The ancient Egyptians painted food on the walls of tombs to provide two-dimensional sustenance in the afterlife, but the classic bowl of fruit made its formal (and frequent) appearance in the frescoes of ancient Rome. The bowl of fruit soon emerged as a common subject in what has come to be known as the still life – “a work of art depicting inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, plants and natural substances like rocks) or man-made (drinking glasses, cigarettes, pipes, hotdogs and so on) in an artificial setting.” Though I haven’t seen many still life paintings of hot dogs.
As the wikipedia article reports, one of the big appeals of the still life for artists is the freedom the form provides in designing the composition of the subject. This level of artifice is part of what has given the still life both its good and bad reputations over time.
Throughout the middle ages and the renaissance, this artifice was used to create detailed religious symbolism. In the early Baroque period, the still life became popular in Italy, yet “ remained historically less respected than ‘grand manner’ painting of historical, religious, and mythic subjects…One additional fact is that before the 17th century, women painters, few as they were, commonly chose or were restricted to painting topics such as still lifes.” Note that the plural is not “still lives” but “still lifes”.
The article goes on to report on the golden age of the still life in 17th century Netherlands: “Images of religious subjects were forbidden in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church…detailed realism and hidden symbols appealed to the growing Dutch middle classes, who were replacing Church and State as the principal patrons of art in the Netherlands.”
In the 18th century, the popularity of the still life spread through Europe, but the rise of European academies re-emphasized “images of historical, Biblical or mythological significance, with still life subjects relegated to the very lowest order of artistic recognition.”
The still life was reclaimed by various waves of modernists and post-modernists, who were interested in bowls of fruit as promising subjects for innovations in technique and design, and with the advent of photography, as opportunities for experiments in the art of mechanical reproduction.
The presence or absence of the bowl of fruit in art history has emerged as a significant marker of where we are at in any particular period on the pendulum swings between the domestic and the epic, the secular and the religious, the middle and working classes and the aristocracy, between design experiments and grand narrative.
The presence of the wax bowl of fruit in my life marks me as solidly domestic, secular, and middle class, and in my fantasy image of myself, somewhere between experimenter in design and spinner of grand narratives.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
www.capeweb.org